A New Pizza Competitor: Bings

You can add bings to the category of on-the-go New Yorker-friendly foods. Bings are sesame seed-encrusted discs of dough filled with anything from spicy pork to mustard greens to red beans. My favorite description is from NY Magazine, which says they look "a little like a sesame-seed bagel that got run over by a taxi." Yeah, pretty much.

The owner of Flushing's Unique Pastry, whose well-deserved nickname is "The Flushing Bing Lady," just opened up a new restaurant called Roll and Dough on W.3rd at 6th Ave in the Village. From the reviews, it sounds like quality hasn't suffered at all in the transition from Queens to Manhattan, which is commendable.

I ran across Roll and Dough the other day when I was looking for a post-beer bite for my subway ride back to Brooklyn. It was tough to choose among all the varieties, but I ended up going with the pork and chive bing. It was a little colder than I would have liked (I learned later that they can toast it for you), but the filling was savory and the right proportion of filling to dough. At $1.50 to $1.95, these deserve to be your go-to food when you need a break from pizza. And in a bit of random but interesting information, one Chowhound reader reports that each variety of bing has its own sesame seed pattern. That's a whole new kind of Braille to learn.

Roll and Dough, 135 W. 3rd St., nr. Sixth Ave.; 212-253-2871.
Reviews elsewhere: Gothamist; Ed Levine Eats; Chowhound; NY Times on her Flushing restaurant.
Photo by roboppy.